Ulfz Udwiyeh, or the Materia Medica

This materia medica - a book of collected knowledge about medicines and their properties - was originally written in Persian by Noureddeen Mohammed Abdullah al-Shirazi (fl.1625-40), physician to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, to whom it was dedicated. This 1793 publication contains entries in Persian, Arabic and Hindi, with English translations by Francis Gladwin (1744-1812), an employee of the East India Company and professor of Persian at Fort William College. The work begins by giving traditional Arabic evaluations of each type of medicine in terms of its power on a scale of 1 to 4, before presenting the dictionary of over 1,400 medicines, some with notes on their properties and usage. Providing an insight into healing practices in India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this work remains of interest to scholars in the history of medicine.